Gurjara-Pratihara Empire

A capital shifted east

formationDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The Gurjaras who built the Pratihara dynasty were, in Smith's own account, foreign immigrants who entered Rajputana alongside or soon after the White Huns, settling in large numbers around Mount Abu and eventually founding a kingdom whose capital, Bhillamala (modern Bhinmal), lay some fifty miles to its northwest. Like other such groups the Gurjaras were absorbed into Hindu society through Hinduization, their ruling families accepted as Kshatriyas and Rajputs; the Pratiharas themselves - Parihars, in the vernacular - were one of four clans a well-known legend traced to a purifying fire at Mount Abu, alongside the Paramaras, Chahamanas and Chaulukyas. Smith reads the myth as a folk memory of exactly this process: foreign newcomers ritually cleansed of their outsider status and admitted into the Hindu caste order as high-ranking warriors.

Leiden University Library · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0

A dethroned raja, a new capital

Panchala, the old kingdom centered on Kanauj, had passed through a chain of weak rulers after Harsha's death in 647 - Yasovarman deposed by a Kashmiri king, Vajrayudha deposed in turn, Indrayudha dethroned around 810 by Dharmapala of Bengal, who installed a client named Chakrayudha on the throne rather than ruling the city directly. Chakrayudha's own tenure lasted only a few years. Around 816 - the date rests on a dated Gwalior inscription - Nagabhata, the ambitious ruler of the Gurjara-Pratihara kingdom at Bhillamala, deposed him and shifted his own capital east to Kanauj, which Smith credits with becoming "again for a considerable time the premier city of Northern India." The move set the Pratiharas on a collision course with the same eastern and southern powers that had already fought over the city once: Dharmapala's own Pala kingdom in Bengal and Bihar, and the Rashtrakuta dynasty of the Deccan, whose king Govinda III claimed an early victory over Nagabhata's own forces in the opening years of the contest.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Koba-chan · CC BY-SA 3.0

Little else is recorded of Nagabhata's own reign at Kanauj, and even less of his son Ramabhadra, who held the throne only briefly before his own son inherited a capital three rival powers were now prepared to fight over for the better part of two centuries.

An empire without exaggeration

peakDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Nagabhata's grandson Mihira, better known by his title Bhoja, reigned for nearly half a century, from around 840 to 890, and gave the Pratihara dynasty the territorial reach Smith judges genuinely imperial: "beyond question a very powerful monarch, whose dominions may be called an 'empire' without exaggeration." His kingdom ran from the Punjab borderlands across most of Rajputana into the greater part of the present United Provinces, with Gwalior and, by the evidence of his successors' own control of Kathiawar, likely Gujarat and Malwa as well. Bhoja liked to present himself as an incarnation of Vishnu, taking the title Adi Varaha, "the primaeval boar," and struck base silver coins bearing it in numbers common enough across Northern India to attest both the length of his reign and the breadth of his rule.

British Museum, London · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · PHGCOM · CC BY-SA 3.0

Three rivals, one city

Bhoja's own borders show exactly how contested that rule was. To the east his territory abutted the Pala kingdom of Devapala, whom he fought successfully; to the southwest his "powerful Rashtrakuta rival"

• allied, notably, with the Muslim rulers of Sind against him - kept his armies constantly alert; to the south the rising Chandela kingdom of Jejakabhukti, in the region later called Bundelkhand, probably acknowledged his overlordship without yet challenging it outright. The three-way contest for paramountcy in the Gangetic plain that had opened with Nagabhata's own seizure of Kanauj was, under Bhoja, a genuine equilibrium: Pratihara strength held both the Palas and the Rashtrakutas at bay without conclusively defeating either.

An heritage preserved intact

Bhoja's son and successor Mahendrapala, who ruled from about 890 to 908, kept the inheritance whole rather than expanding it further - Smith describes him ruling "all Northern India, except the Panjab and Indus valley, from the borders of Bihar to the shore of the Arabian sea," with inscriptions from Gaya suggesting Magadha itself came under Pratihara control for a time. His own court hosted the poet Rajasekhara, author of the Karpuramanjari and a treatise on the art of poetry, who continued to serve the dynasty into the reign of Mahendrapala's younger son - a literary patronage that marks the Pratihara court at its most secure, in the brief interval between Bhoja's own conquests and the decline that would begin within a generation of Mahendrapala's death.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Varun Shiv Kapur · CC BY 2.0

A recovered capital

contractionDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The equilibrium Mihira Bhoja had held broke under his grandson Mahipala, who took the throne around 910. In 916 the Rashtrakuta king Indra III's armies captured Kanauj outright - Smith calls it a blow that "gave a severe blow to the power of the Pratihara dynasty" - and the loss of Kathiawar and other outlying provinces that Mahipala had still held two years earlier followed soon after. Indra III's own forces were not positioned to hold so distant a capital for long, though, and Mahipala recovered Kanauj with help from the Chandela king of Jejakabhukti - the same southern neighbour whose own rise the Pratiharas had watched from a position of strength under Bhoja, now returning the favour as an ally rather than a subordinate.

A weakening hand

The recovery did not restore the balance of power the sack had broken. Mahipala's own successor Devapala, who reigned from around 940 to 955, was forced to surrender a prized image of Vishnu to the Chandela king Yasovarman, who installed it in one of the finest temples of his own new capital at Khajuraho - a small transaction that Smith reads as proof the Chandela kingdom, once a Pratihara subordinate, had grown stronger than its old overlord. Devapala's brother and successor Vijayapala, ruling from about 960 to 990, lost Gwalior itself, the dynasty's ancient possession, to a Kachchhapaghata chief who founded a local line that would hold the fortress for more than a century and a half. By the time the Solanki kingdom of Anhilwara was founded in Gujarat around the same period, Smith notes, the king of Kanauj "no longer had any concern with Western India" - territory the empire of Bhoja had once controlled outright.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · George Edward Herne · Public domain

A new threat from the northwest

The contest for Kanauj that had defined the dynasty's rise was, by the last decades of the tenth century, no longer the main danger facing it. A new power was pressing through the northwestern passes: the Amir of Ghazni, Sabuktigin, whose raids against the Hindu Shahi kingdom of the Punjab drew King Rajyapala of Kanauj into a great confederacy of Hindu princes assembled in 991 to resist him - a coalition that included the Chandela king Ganda and was, in the event, disastrously defeated. The frontier that had once separated Kanauj from any serious outside threat had closed, and within another three decades the dynasty would face, in Sabuktigin's own son Mahmud, an enemy more dangerous than the Rashtrakutas and Palas had ever been combined.

Seven forts in a single day

endDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni made a career of raiding Northern India, leaving his capital each October and marching three months into the richest interior provinces before returning home laden with plunder - seventeen such expeditions in all, by Smith's count. Early in January 1019 he appeared before Kanauj itself. Rajyapala, whose confederacy against the Ghaznavids had already been broken once at the Kurram valley, "made no serious attempt to defend his capital," and the seven forts guarding the city all fell to Mahmud in a single day. Mahmud plundered the forts, spared the city itself, and returned quickly to Ghazni with his booty; Rajyapala made what terms he could, abandoned Kanauj outright, and retired across the Ganges to Bari.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Daderot · CC0

A punishment for surrender

Rajyapala's own submission enraged the Hindu allies who had counted on Kanauj to hold. An army under Vidhyadhara, heir apparent of the Chandela king Ganda, struck Kanauj that spring or summer, soon after Mahmud's own departure, and killed Rajyapala for the humiliation of his surrender - handing his diminished territory to a successor, Trilochanapala. Mahmud, who regarded Rajyapala as his own vassal, was furious at the killing and marched back into India that same autumn, capturing the new Pratihara capital at Bari early in 1020 before advancing against Ganda's own Chandela territory - where the Chandela king, exactly as Rajyapala had done, lost his nerve and fled the field without giving battle, abandoning his camp and elephants to the Sultan.

A dynasty that disappeared utterly

Trilochanapala's own reign left little trace beyond an ineffectual attempt to resist Mahmud's crossing of the Jumna and a single land grant recorded in 1027; a king named Yasahpala, attested in an inscription of 1036, may have been his immediate successor. Beyond that point Smith can name no more Pratihara kings - only "other obscure chiefs" who continued to be recognized as rajas of Kanauj, governing in subordination to Muslim overlords, their names surviving in scattered records from a residence at Zafarabad near Jaunpur. The old dynasty's own hold on Kanauj itself ended a little before 1090, when a Gaharwar chief named Chandradeva conquered and occupied the city and established a new line there. Smith's own verdict on the transition is unambiguous: the later chiefs "did not belong to the old Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty, which disappeared utterly" - a line that had once ruled, under Mihira Bhoja, an empire stretching from the Punjab to the Arabian Sea, ending not in a final battle but in a slow fade into obscure, tributary chieftaincy nobody thought worth naming.